an ending, in two parts
by the hikikomori life
Summary: Eventually, everything comes to an end. You know this better than most: you, Remus John Lupin, to whom loss is practically a way of life.


_i. before it all ends_

Eventually, everything comes to an end. You know this better than most: you, Remus John Lupin, to whom loss is practically a way of life. In the morning you wake up, grope around on the bedside table and can't find your reading glasses. Mid-day heat lulls you into losing track of time; you sit in the bath and scrub until your skin is tender and pink, like raw meat. But it's at night when the sense of loss is most acute-- when you come down the stairs to dinner, to the empty table in an empty house, draw in one shuddery, shattered breath, and find yourself utterly alone.

So you knew it would happen. You knew it, bone-deep, like other inescapable truths of the world- the cycle of the monstrous moon, the birth and death and rebirth of it in the night sky- you knew that one day, Sirius would die. That one day, this shining warm center of your universe would be snuffed out . It's just that-- just that... somehow, you always imagined there'd be something more. Some sort of fanfare seeing him off. A burial party-- he wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Even a body to bury, or just-- more _time_. Even now the thought makes you grit your teeth, and you clutch at the banister as though it will ground you, and tell yourself _That's no way to go. Not so suddenly._

But you do think 'sudden' is a good word for it: what better way to describe the fireworks, red and gold, exploding behind your eyelids-- for that wordless stunned stupor, the sluggish backwards-arc that's carved itself into your memory? For the way your heart thumped in your chest, beating a wretched tattoo against your ribcage and then the veil fluttered, slammed shut and suddenly you couldn't feel your heartbeat at all.

You can't fathom the sudden thickness constricting your throat, and so open a window-- for after all, this is a house that stifles people.

-

_ii. wake_

At night you lie in bed wishing fervently to never fall asleep again. It feels like you haven't, not for many nights: you just slide under the covers and watch the ceiling, with all the shadows making their way across it creepy-crawly cowering in the corners, from one end of the room to the other, in the morning to disappear and before you know it, you're awake again. Time passes like nothing at all, breakfast blurring into teatime and a missed dinner is in the next moment breakfast again. Funny how the days seem shorter when you don't sleep. Or perhaps they become one long unending day instead; being indifferent to that sort of thing is second nature now.

There are too many things in this house-- all sorts of things contained inside it and the things you associate with it, that you really ought to have left behind now but somehow never found the heart to. Twelve years ago you'd thought-- you'd both thought that the days of Number Twelve Grimmauld Place had finally come to an end; that it would be abandoned, forgotten, left to forever languish in ignoble decrepitude.

But here you remain, trapped in a house built on regrets, enveloped in memories of unhappier times. Here a tear in the fabric of a sofa from when Sirius lost his temper; there a discoloured blotch on the carpet which used to belong inside a bottle labelled _Ogden's Best_. There are too many _things_, and you've no idea what's to be done about all of them, for this is none of it yours.

At some point after it happens-- you're not too sure how long after, two weeks sounds about right-- you find, in Sirius's old room, a stash of things squirreled away from your school days. You're amazed by how much of it there is: sheaves of paper, not school-work but Marauder-things, notes, doodles, anything on parchment that might have been passed from hand to grubby hand, hoarded like gold or silver. It's a strange feeling, like discovering your life crammed into boxes-- boxes succintly labelled, in that familiar, elegant hand, '_Moony's stuff_'. (You should've expected it, but it's still a surprise, finding boxes devoted completely to the storage of things received from one Mssr. Moony.)

Before all of this, when you were younger-- when you were _young_-- the easy eloquence that Sirius wielded amazed you; you were star-struck with the newness of life, and living, and only too glad to have friends at all. Words were his domain; they never failed him, and you, despite what you might have said at the time-- you loved him for it.

Now you can't bear to think of any words at all, whether scrawled on parchment or across the top of boxes charmed-shut, and _especially _hidden in places you-know-exactly-where, because that way, you'll never have to find them.

At night, you lie in bed, shadow-watching, and wait for something to happen.

It always ends with waking up.


End file.
